Chronicle Online e-News
New book asks, 'Why Aren't More Women in Science?'
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec06/book.wome
n.science.ssl.html
Dec. 13, 2006
By Susan Lang
ssl4@cornell.edu
Is the reason why more women don't go into science or engineering
because teachers, parents or others hold them back? Is it because
they are not as interested in scientific fields as they are other
disciplines or because they aren't up to the math and science
challenges? Or is it because such institutional barriers as biased
promotion practices prevent them from pursuing tenure and launching a
family at the same time?
These are the issues explored in the new book, "Why Aren't More Women
in Science? Top Gender Researchers Debate the Evidence," edited by
Cornell professors of human development Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M.
Williams.
"Specifically, we examine the question of how much of the variance in
successful scientific performance is attributable to cognitive
differences between men and women," write the editors in their
introduction. "Readers will also find discussions of many
noncognitive factors, such as willingness to work excessively long
hours at one's science job, the demands outside of the job that
impinge on women's science participation and why there continues to
be debate about the meaning of the constructs of ability, achievement
and intelligence."
The need to discuss the issues is critical, write the authors,
considering that at the top 50 universities, the proportion of full
professorships held by women ranges from 3 to 15 percent. For
example, although women earned 31 percent of chemistry Ph.D.s between
1993 and 2003, they were hired for less than 22 percent of the
assistant professorships in 2002. Similar underrepresentations can be
found in other mathematically intensive fields.
The book includes 15 essays on gender differences written by top
researchers from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom,
who at times, Ceci and Williams note, interpret the same data on the
causes and consequences of so few women in certain fields of science
differently. The essays range from discussing the role of prenatal
and postnatal hormones on spatial cognition and the claim that female
babies are "naturally" more oriented toward people than are male
babies (who are more oriented toward objects) to discussions on the
differences between female and male brains and social factors
pertaining to balancing work and family.
"At last! Psychological science enters the 'Great Debate' over women
and science, salvages it from emotional rhetoric, and sends us on
with profound new understandings of this complex issue," writes Frank
Farley, past president of the American Psychological Association and
an educational psychology professor at Temple University. "Read no
other material on women in science until you've digested this book.
This is the read of the year in psychology and education. Any steps
forward will have to be based on this comprehensive, solidly
scientific volume."
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